quality of food at a relatively higher price. In addition, low levels of sanitation—
as the germ theory of disease was widely accepted only toward the end of the nineteenth-century—contributed to a low level of nutritional status.
1853/57 there was an increase in real weekly earnings, though less than 30 percent. Thus, the early industrialization puzzle characterized by increasing real wages and declining heights seems to find confirmation also here. However, in order to get a better understanding of the trend in nutritional status we believe that the focus should be shifted from the individual to the family level. In fact, the following question should be addressed: Was the increment in the real wage large enough to allow for a sufficient sustenance of the family in a framework of high (and rising) fertility?53 Our estimated pattern of nutritional status between the 1820s and the 1860s suggests a negative answer: The increment in the real wage was not large enough.54 The evidence we provide here about the delay with which workers reached their final height in the nineteenth-century points to a similar conclusion. Certainly the deterioration of the average nutritional status is not mono-causal. The effects of high relative price of food, poor housing, public health, or food adulteration, which are all variables difficult to account for, can partially explain the declining trend in heights showed by the regression analysis.
The same applies for the large incidence of child labor in the industrializing British society (Horrell and Humphries, 1995). We showed that the nutritional advantage for those who (probably) had been students—therefore with few or no child labor experience—was large and equal to 1.25 cm in the eighteenth-century and 1.84 cm in the nineteenth-eighteenth-century. Those estimates could be interpreted as quantifications in terms of nutritional status of the trade-off between education and child labor.
In conclusion, the early industrialization puzzle is probably not so puzzling when we consider the family unit rather than the single individual. The puzzle arise when we mistakenly compare a measure (the real wage) which affected just one component of the family (the wage-earner) with a measure (height) which is the result of a complex system of interactions which involves the family unit and the surrounding disease environment.55 The height that we observe is the
53 Throughout the long eighteenth century the Gross Reproduction Rate (GRR) rose by 36 percent. The combined effect of a decline in stillbirth rate and the fall in the mean-age of marriage account for three quarters of the rise in GRR (Wrigley 2004, p.75).
54 Also Feinstein (1998, p. 650) stressed that allowing for demographic change, the standard of living of the average family might have been reduced by 10 percent.
55 Height is also a more accurate measure than the real wage for this period because (i) there are more sources of error in measuring wages (e.g. limited regional and industrial coverage), (ii) height can focus on children and youth for whom there are no real wage indexes.
endogenous response to the socio-economic dynamics within the family nucleus.
The average heights of the period 1820-1870, despite any increase in the real wage, simply mirror the inability or impossibility to maintain an adequate nutritional status in the working-class families where the recruits were nurtured.
Whatever the rise in the wage rate during this period, we provide substantive evidence that it was not enough to maintain a given nutritional status of children and youth. Or in alternative, a trade-off between quality and quantity of children might have influenced the decision of the families. It could be the case that working class families of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century were deliberately willing to have more children at the cost of a lower average nutritional status.56 Institutions like the English Poor Law might have provided incentives in this sense. Evidence that in 1832, despite the increase in farm labor wages, 80 percent of rural south-eastern parishes continued to pay child allowances seems to be in favor of this hypothesis.57 However, this study provides substantive evidence of a generalized decline in average nutritional status in Britain during the hundred years between 1750 and 1850, shedding new light on the standard of living debate and uncovering the negative effects brought about by the early industrial revolution.
56 Extra-marital fertility could also play a role. But according to Wrigley (2004) the increase in illegitimacy fertility increased overall fertility only by about 4.7 percent. The large rise in overall fertility was mostly due to fall in stillbirth rate and mean-age of marriage. See also footnote 53.
57 Boyer (1990), p.49.
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